Wow, how compelling is that for a title of an article? I mean, doesn’t everyone want passive income? Isn’t that the holy grail, the promised land and the hopes and dreams of every Internet entrepreneur and would-be professional blogger?

Well maybe not, but let’s face it, we all want passive income and we all want to hear about opportunities to create it. I certainly do.

As you put into action techniques to make money online you begin to realize how truly NOT passive most ways of making money on the Internet are. In fact, I am yet to come across one income method that really is passive – and by that I mean pure passive. You set it up, walk away and it keeps making money.

True, there are systems you can set up that are low maintenance. You can even build businesses and have other people run them, but if you take stock in reality, even the best business models require you to do something. You still need to check in every now and then to make sure your employees are doing what they are supposed to.

Perhaps you don’t have employees and run a pay per click affiliate marketing business as a solo professional, sitting at home setting up AdWords campaigns for a living. Unfortunately, even the best pay per click artists still have to check on their campaigns now and then, so out the door with passive income.

Blogging as we know is not passive – far from it for most bloggers. The average blogger that actually makes money from it does it only when they perform certain actions. If you don’t write, then you don’t get paid.

Passive income is hard to generate for one reason – the world is dynamic. Human beings, some who work with you, some who you compete against, are dynamic, and because of that, if you are to do business, you must be dynamic. The only way to respond to dynamism and succeed, is to be dynamic yourself, and therein lies the work – and the end of any chance for passive income.

In order to react to a constantly changing environment, you must constantly change yourself. Changing takes work, that’s why it’s so hard to find ways to make money that are passive – sustainability requires change.

How Can A Blog Post Become Passive Income?

Today I completed Blog Mastermind Lesson 22. All modesty aside, I think it was one of the best lessons I have produced so far because it covers a topic I know well, that most bloggers don’t – affiliate marketing.

As I was writing the lesson I realized just how complex the structure of the system I use to make money with my blog is, yet also how effective it can be once it is set up. I won’t explain everything here – it took me more than four thousand words to explain all the parts to my students in Blog Mastermind – but thanks to writing it out in detail I came to a realization. If done right, affiliate marketing on a blog can almost be passive income.

I say almost because in truth you still need to do something in order to keep sales coming through. That something is usually write new content to keep the blog active. Without activity, eventually the flow of traffic will cease. It might take a long long time, especially for blogs in a high authority position with firm rankings in the search engines, but eventually, a blog with no new content stream will die…at least I think it will (I often wonder whether a blog like Steve Pavlina’s would ever die given the eternal nature of his blog posts – I think the search engines and all those incoming links might continue to send him traffic for a long, long time).

How My System Works

I use a combination of writing review articles, referencing the reviews in other blog articles, highlighting the reviews in a specific blog page, search engine optimization and email list marketing, to make the system work.

It goes like this –

  1. You write a product or service review using a format designed to educate and sell (the selling part is with an affiliate link for the product of course). Writing reviews like this is not an easy task, but once done, the review is an asset – an income producing blog article.
  2. After writing the review, you send a broadcast to your email list, hopefully driving a rush of initial sales. Usually the email broadcast combined with the natural peak attention period new blog articles go through when they are just released, results in the largest chunk of affiliate sales.
  3. You add the email to your newsletter sequence, so at some point in the future every person who joins your email list will be notified of the review. This is where the first part of the passive income is generated. Long after the review is written and the email is first broadcast, new subscribers are still exposed to it, driving a consistent, albeit small stream of sales (this will vary of course based on the responsiveness of your list).
  4. Your review is indexed in the search engines, and provided you do a few smart things with how you structured the review, you continue to receive new visitors to the review from search engine results. This is another point where passive income is generated.
  5. Listing the review in your resources page and referring back to the review in future blog posts also serves to bring more traffic to the review and thus hopefully more affiliate sales too.

Although there are multiple facets to this approach and success depends on a lot of other variables, like whether you manage to build a popular blog, gain search engine authority and build an email list, if you tick all the boxes, this is an amazing formula for near-passive income from blogs.

I realize my description of the system may be somewhat abstract, especially if you are new to blogging and email list building. If you want a more detailed description, where I go through every step, you have two options:

1. Join Blog Mastermind, where in Lesson 22 I breakdown the system in a lot more detail, or…

2. Sign up for my affiliate blogging email list by entering your details below, then wait for news on further study materials on affiliate blogging, which is a concept I discussed in-depth in this recent article – The Secret To Big Profits Selling Affiliate Products From Your Blog.

My system is probably not something every blogger can successfully replicate – there is a lot of grunt work to be done to get your blog and email list into the position where it works, but once you are there, it is a beautiful thing.

If you enjoy the process of blogging, then using certain blog posts as affiliate income sources, some passive, some active, is by far one of the best to monetize a blog.

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro
Blogging Longterm